Star Wars: Revenge Of The Studio Office Pool
Do you feel alienated from the crushing hype surrounding this weekend's release of the last Star Wars movie? Maybe you need a financial stake in the box office outcome to make you feel like you've got a piece of the action. Today's LAT notes that studio types are throwing some money in a hat, just to keep things interesting.
Executives at three major studios have organized informal office pools, where the closest prediction of the prequel's four-day gross takes the pot. The buy-in for the Walt Disney pool is $25; the winner could pocket $500 for nailing the movie's four-day total. Similar pools are being held at 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures Entertainment.
There's nothing wrong with a little side-wager between office pals, but we think that the Star Wars-distributing Fox pool has too many conflicts to be much fun. The guesses for the weekend take start at $300 million and run all the way up to eleventy billion dollars, the theoretical monetary limit previously reserved to prevent Vin Diesel from marching animatronic elephants over a man-made mountain range.